Right from its birth in 1892, the Star has been reporting doomsday theories.

The Maya temple of Kukulkan is seen at the archaeological site of Chichen Itza, Mexico. Dec. 21 marks the end of an age in a 5,125 year-old Maya calendar, an event that some interpret as the end of days.

As Toronto residents scrambled to survive the early days of the Great Depression, a local author gave them something else to worry about.

“Within 15 years there will not be a living thing in all the world,” Hamilton resident A.B. Davis told Star reporter Gordon Sinclair in a March 16, 1931 story. Davis, 36, said he expected Western nations were about to reform Communist China, which would mean, “war will pile up on war. The great minds will invent articles of destruction and the result will be quick and complete disaster.”

More than 80 years after Davis’ doomsday prediction, the world is scrutinizing another end-of-days promise. According to people who have studied the ancient Mayan calendar, the world will end Friday.

Yet, those who are concerned can take comfort in the knowledge that many have predicted the end of the world.

Suggestions that the world is about to end have been made from time immemorial. Sixteenth-century French oracle Michel Nostradamus, various religions, an astrologer with a syndicated newspaper column — even a former U.S. presidential candidate — have all claimed to know when the world will end.

Almost from the moment the Star began publishing in 1892, editors appreciated the public’s appetite for a good story about a prospective apocalypse.

On April 7, 1894, a headline in the Star read, “Get Ready for the Wind-up” and an accompanying story reported that St. Louis faith doctor J.S. Willis predicted Jesus would return to Earth Thursday March 6, 1896, at 3 p.m. (Jerusalem time). But before then, Willis promised, the world would be ensnared in a series of wars and revolutions.

A Woodstock evangelist named H. Myddleton Wood in 1896 told a local congregation that the second coming of Christ was at hand, the Star reported, and in 1900, the paper covered the Toronto visit of a South Bend, Ind., resident named Mrs. A. Elberson who held an open-air meeting at the corner of Chestnut and Queen Sts.

Elberson, who was jeered during her lecture, said she had come to know about the pending destruction of the world seven years earlier.

End-of-the-world predictions became a dime a dozen.

So much so that in March 1931, a week before Davis’s prediction, The Star Weekly published a front-page story noting that, up until that point, 1931 stood to be the first year since 1915 that a seer had not called for the world’s imminent destruction. “It may explain why more people are saving than ever before,” read the story.

A few days later, Sinclair printed Davis’s claims.

During the 1950s, Jeane Dixon, an astrologer who had a syndicated newspaper column, gained fame for her psychic predictions.

She wrote in the May 13, 1956, issue of Parade Magazine that the 1960 presidential election would be won by a Democrat who would die in office. (John F. Kennedy was assassinated Nov. 22, 1963.)

After foretelling Kennedy’s murder, Dixon later predicted there would be a planetary alignment on Feb. 4, 1962 that would herald the world’s destruction. (She also said the Soviets would put the first man on the moon.)

Television evangelist Pat Robertson in 1980 predicted the world’s destruction, according to the book Salvation for Sale, an Insider’s View of Pat Robertson’s Ministry, written by Gerald Thomas Straub, a former producer of The 700 Club.

“He’s had it up to here and the hour of His wrath has come,” Robertson was quoted as saying during a Jan. 1, 1980, staff meeting. “Now if I’m hearing Him right, things are starting to happen. What is started over in the Middle East is not going to stop short of a war.”

The war, Robertson said, would herald the end of the world.

During the late 1980s, Elizabeth Clare Prophet stoked fears when she warned of nuclear Armageddon that would come with a nuclear strike by the Soviet Union against the United States. More than 2,000 followers left their homes and flocked to her church’s compound near Yellowstone National Park. There they began stockpiling weapons, food and clothing in a system of concrete and steel shelters.

Only last year, Harold Camping, who ran a non-profit radio chain, spent millions of dollars to buy billboard space across the U.S. and print millions of pamphlets warning of doomsday. Camping, who earlier predicted the world would end in 1984, said he used a complex formula relying on numbers in the Bible to conclude the world would end May 21, 2011.

Fans of a potential apocalypse may have the chance to live through yet another countdown.

In 1961, a physicist at the University of Illinois named Heinz von Foerster calculated that, on or about Friday, Nov. 13, 2026, the world’s exploding population would become so dense that everyone would be “squeezed to death,” according to the New York Times.